Dragon Ball Z: To Distant Places
by SternInquisition
Summary: The Adventures Continue! When young Bra is abducted by mysterious and sinister forces, Goku and the Z-Fighters take the fight to the stars in their search for Vegeta's kin. R & R
1. Chapter 1  On A Day Like Today

**Apprx. Date -/Age. 789\August-September/ Apprx. Gal. Sect. Co-ord/s: [Y-Axis: -] [X-Axis: -] [Z-Axis: -] Apprx. Gal. Sect.: Unverifiable – No Reference Point**

_We stand at the brink of an overwhelming chasm, stuck somewhere within space, time, and the chaos in between. I'm looking into a void that yawns so deeply into infinity, that to give it more than a spare second glance would invite a slow, inexorable madness. So I don't. I give the horizon my fullest attention. It's filled with the swollen orb of some bloated sun, giant and carmine, crusted with thick dark splotches across its southern pole and so distended it was just managing 'ovoid.' Strangely, it looks backlit; like the effect of a glass ball planted in front of a candlewick brazing the air with heavy heat and light. But that's where we are. Atop a cliff face formed from splinters of cobalt, flint, and slivers of unrefined copper, attached to a mountain that's taken us a hard week just surmounting. And we're gifted fliers, mind you. _

_It's like something out of an old fashioned 'human' epic. A band of heroes, boggling landscapes, a noble quest, with victory or death certain at the end. To my left are the 'commanders', astride atop a sharp outcropping that's forming a dizzying point above the thick pitch shades of void below. Goku. Vegeta. Gohan. You couldn't ask for more talented warriors. I did, though. To my left are a few sitting in a dried basin-bowl or standing at the cliff edge. Young Trunks and Goten. With Krillin, Tien and Yamcha. The sons and the friends. Especially the latter three. They came on a favour. Yamcha's gotten back enough of his brazenness to willingly stride through viper nests. And Tien. Despite his own protests, he has marked talents that have done serviceably in the years past. He's better than he knows. Then there's Krillin. Diminutive, stocky, questioning, doubtful, longing for home. The most normal of us; but don't dare relax your guard with him. Ex-monk or not… He has a way of surprising you._

_I reserve my thoughts from idling and gauging my companions. An old habit, from old days. I look back across the chasm of darkness and towards the deathly star. We're atop a mountain rivaling Olympus Mons of Mars. It's just the nine of us, chasing after a damnably elusive quarry. To say we're a long way from home is an understatement. At the back of my mind, Kami whispers 'Dende'. I swallow and remark to myself that I'll see the boy again. We all will. It's just a matter of carrying on. But we are so very far out and where I cannot begin to imagine. We've failed in contacting King Kai, or any others. Which means one of two things. Firstly, we're maybe in an uncharted sector of the North Universe. Secondly, that maybe we're not in the North Sector at all, and have somehow slipped through a spacial crack that's spawned passage from one plain of reality to another. I'm banking on the latter._

_But what are we doing so far from home, on a perilous chase through even the fabric of reality spheres, you ask? It's simple. Bra. Little Bra, second child of the mighty Prince of All Saiyans. Vegeta's baby girl and Trunks' kid sister. They've taken her. 'They' we don't quite have figured out. But they have resources and wills of iron to match our own. That, and monstrously powerful magic combined with deadly minions. I have many questions, most which have gone unanswered. This is bleak and a shade dark. But I don't doubt we'll win this yet. Not with Goku, Krillin, Gohan, Trunks, Yamcha, Tien. And Vegeta. Vegeta, especially._

_And myself. I am the Nameless Namek. They call me Piccolo. And know this. We are finding little Bra. We are taking her back, then finding our way home._

_And I will kill anyone who stands in our way._

_Chapter 1_

_Age 789 - August 10th  
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'Satan' City. Cosmopolitan and Metropolitan in every facet. Flood Street ran a square kilometer through the cities heart, lined on either side by financial institutions that governed the flow of Earth's cumulative wealth. The architecture were wildly variant; one structure observed had the likeness of a two-hundred story Taj Mohall, next to it a tower of dark glass, shale-steel, a flying-V insignia traced out of burnished stainless alloys and affixed to the roof's crown. Beyond the banking and share-trading were the administration centers, great domes of webbed tube-struts riveted to crystalline etched panes, surrounding high-scrapers ending with multi-pronged communication stacks and tele-poles. It was all magnificent. Impressive. The intended effect. Satan City was, in effect, a slowly hulking hive. Another quarter century and the technophile mindset at root in the central districts would worm out in the neighborhoods, the foundries, the refineries, the factories. Everything would be high-end and neon.

It was summer and a warm Thursday. Edgewater was a small neighborhood, towards the west, nestled with suckling contentment beneath the sun-shadows of Flood Street and all her bloated junket skyscrapers, building ravines, and inordinate greed. It was 'Edgewater' for its precipice of paved levies and embankments built against the rushing Red River, with two roads that mimicked one another down to the slow loop near the river before curling back and winding a trail into the inner-city labyrinth. The houses were short and only under a dozen broke four-stories. The well-to-do mini-clans, with hundred thousand plus Zeni air-cars, brat-kids with idle time, and the few idealist millionaires thankful, grateful, and a tad trite at their luck with money.

Ludd & Co. Banking had hoisted a small branch there, for simpler convenience and for tying up local investment for that sector. The building itself was unassuming. Three stories, faux-brick, tan and brown and unimaginative, with utilitarian squares and a general ooze of bureaucracy and cash. The front steps were three low flights of mixed quartz and grey stone, barred with sleek banisters that had a touch of craftmanship with bulbous, neatly curled 'pixie-boot' twists end-grips. An unassuming bank branch, in a quiet neighborhood, on a Thursday like any other.

So no one paid particular heed when a rust-bucket jalopy pulled up before the Ludd & Co. Bank. It was an older heavy-duty model, mounted a chassis with antique, rusting wing-springs and sporting an arboreal 'camo'-job for paint. That too, was accented with deepening gouges of rust along the fender rims and cab door hinges. It squawked along, windows half-rolled and trailing some sorrowful guitar acoustics and a 'Sorry-For-Himself' singer. The driver kept an arm leaned over the window, a cigarette half-smoked and lazing between thick, yellow fingers. His forearm was gauzed with thick curly hair-strings that had bleached white, tattooed with a pattern of fading blue-ink, some tacky inbred mark. He rolled the jalopy, on a slow cruise, into an open parallel park. His right-hand, a fist of scarred meat, clenched around the manual gear-rod and shunted into 'Park'. At his nod, the three passengers, each wearing an oversized baseball cap and ripped denim, exited and began to walk briskly.

A woman, with a proud bust and a blue dress to let everyone sink in their own observations, turned to make eyes at one of three who caught her with his rugged handsomeness. She smiled, deep lips, long lashes, dark skin and black hair done up in a neat knot against her neck before falling to the middle of her spine. He smiled back, cheeks grimed with the previous days' stubble, a little sallow but his arms previewed strength begotten from a hard life. His wife-beater hugged against his chest. The woman winked, her flirt finished, her visage indelibly stamped on the poor boy's brain. She was turning to keep up her high-heel trot, when she noticed what was gripped in his right fist. A grip-stock pump-shotgun. He winked back at her, pulled on the underslung primer, grinned something evil and lecherous before he and his compatriots waltzed through the banks double front doors.

They made it apparent their aptitude for violence. The First Robber, head bald and waxed, face inked to resemble a ghoul, pulled double-pistols from his low-slung pant waistbands. He twisted at the hip and shot the security guard to their left, just inside near the right-hand set of doors on the way out. The man's baby-blue shirt tore out with hot bursts of red blood and pink gore, managing just a pained scream before sliding dead down the wall. The screaming started. The Second Robber collected a machine pistol from an underarm holster hidden by his ripped jacket. At the sound of the first gunshots, he turned and kept them cover, steadying his bulged arm.

Public reception was a tall hall tiled with thick slabs of gray marble, covering across the floor and up the walls by three-quarters. A long central row carpeted by smooth velvet ran from the doorway to the back transaction tills. A trio of guards burst from a back door laid flush against the marble. The Second Robber caught the tell-tail sigh of the hinges and hugged back on his pistol trigger. It sprayed a cone of lead that sent two guards rolling back with eviscerated upper chests and throats, and the third fell back with chunks missing from his right arm. The Third Robber hefted his shotgun and blew him off his feet. A nearby teller squealed when the guards' demise spattered his face with high-pressure gore sprays. Then he died too, when the Third Robber pushed the gun barrel to his temple and spread his brain-matter across his high-chair.

"Everyone!" The First Robber screamed. "Hit the floor! Hands on your head! You mess with me, and you're _done_! Comprende?"

There was a shuffle of stumbling feet, flopping knees, and to the trios satisfaction, the dozen or so visitors of the day sunk to the floor and hugged the tile like leeches. The Third Robber kept a wide cone of vision over them, letting the First and Second handle the tills and the cash. The Second Robber stuck his machine-pistol in a young woman's face. She could have been no more than twenty three at the latest. Her eyes bubbled with tears and her bottom lip was beginning to swell from the hard bite of her lip. His breath was a coy mixture of cheap whiskey and mint. He shoved a thick duffel bag, Kevlar straps and all, into her chest.

"Get back there," He ordered, motioning to the heavy pad-locked doors and the vaults beyond. "You got two and a half minutes to fill the bag. Greenbacks. 'Twenties if you don't mind. Every fifteen extra seconds past will cost you one of your friends here."

He motioned his Glock down the till-line, where her fellow staff sat back with upraised hands. She tried not to cry when they begged her with pleading stares to hurry. She swung off her high-chair and ran, cheeks red and wetting, making for the back rooms and the holding vaults. The First Robber had gone back to idly patrol the front doors. His work-boots squelched and tracked blood from the first guard kill. He strained to hear outside, where what small crowd that had been gathering to see what the bloody racket had been about dispersed at his first sight. He grinned, relished the fear, and kept an ear cocked for the reedy siren howls of incoming cop air-cars. His fingers idly played with the trigger guards. He looked to his wrist-watch. Forty-five seconds. Bitch better hurry up or—

A padlock door slammed open and the Second Robber nearly shot till-girl out of surprise. His high arched face spat a distasteful glare and he rattled her with an acute, stinging tirade of slurs while motioning to get a move on. She trundled up to the counter, slid the duffel across the slick laminate like the thing had caught disease, and stepped back onto her high chair. The Second Robber hefted his precious bundle, felt the solid weight of paper cash and began to back away. His eyes had beaded into paranoid slits and his right hand kept the machine pistol trained on the girl.

"We're done," He signaled vocally. His co-conspirators kept flank before shooting out the glass doors and escaping out into the afternoon. There were sounds of muffled crying. Civilians were picking themselves up from the ground, others just laid there. Someone, a man, middle-aged with a slight overhang gut, was leaning over a guard corpse, shaking his head, staring blankly.

The wheelman was already gunning the rough cough of the pickup's engine block. Sirens were picking up a raggedly wearing tune, coming from the south. Light-specks flashed, like distant pulsars, above a low row of nondescript office pre-fabs. The gunmen rushed the sidewalk stair flights, one making for a good cocky show by sliding arse-down a swooped banister and back onto his feet. All were chuckling with an adrenaline high. They'd barely cleared into the pickup cab when their driver stabbed a fat barefoot into the gas pedal and accelerated. The truck squealed from the parallel parking cell, onto the sidewalk, smashing down a foot row of public flower boxes, and onto a north-side street embanking along the Red River.

"Well?" The driver asked. The First Robber in front passenger seat zipped open the duffel. The driver whistled a sweet tune at the thick cash bundles shoved chunkily in.

"Damn. Damn, that's nice. Real nice," His wide face beamed. The Third Robber was busy chatting up in the back seats, stowing his shotgun on a rack nailed roughshod to the rear window.

"Man, Hue, you check that bitch in the blue dress?" He grinned.

Hue shared a gapped smile. "Ohhh yeah. Little Curly here was gonna score himself some poon'. Money first, though, Curl."

"Money first. Chicks second," Curl recited. "Whiskey on the truck home."

"Learnin' good, Curl," said the wheelman.

"Real obliged, Jesse… Ohhh shit, Jesse!"

Curly stabbed his arm forward, pointing in alarm. Out of the blue, with a snap of air, a man in a black bodyglove and green belted tunic was standing little over a square meter from the truck's front grill. Jesse, the wheelman, felled perhaps by the shock, didn't bother to break. The First Robber at his side yelled and shut his eyes against the coming meat splatter. Save it never came.

Saiyaman raised his right arm and opened up the palm. The truck was a good five tonnes of old-fashioned steel chassis. It didn't matter. Like paper and Styrofoam, it just ripped and crumpled in against his hand until Saiyaman was half-standing inside the engine block, the six-litre itself curled open and spurting high-fountains of crude oil. Gas heating to vapor escaped from exposed pistons with high-pitched whines. Amidst clatter of falling components and the smashed, sagging front axels, Saiyaman took a hop-step back. He tugged an adjustment on his white-headband, pressed his shades a quarter-inch higher on his nose-bridge, then crossed corded arms and surveyed the scene.

Jesse, Robber Number One, Hue and Curly were all half-conscious in the ruined cab. Jesse's flat pate was stickled with glass and his nose was contorted and squeezing blood down his lips. Robber Number One and Hue were leaning against their seats, faces bruised and half entrapped by the warped doors and deck-floor. Curly was the only one beginning to extricate. The boy was swearing gutturally up and down his list of impolite terms, dragging body and shotgun from the backseat. The cab-door finally gave when he planted his boot to the door-catch a third time. Saiyaman observed him waddle out unsteadily. Police air-cars were rapidly gaining, one or two from the local precinct hovering uncertainly overhead.

"What-I-You…" Curly gasped. One arm was hugging his diaphragm. His denim jacket was finally just rags left on the backseat, his wife-beater dirtied with browning dust and his own blood. There was an unhealthy swelling over his left ribs. Regardless, the thug primed a shell and aimed the shotgun square for Saiyaman's solid chest.

"Sumbitch!" He hollered. Saiyaman, face impassive, returned nothing. The silence egged Curly on, blood hot with pain, anger and adrenaline. "Screw you, 'Superhero'! _This _close, you hear me? Coulda just let us ride by! 'Hell's your problem, you got my friends killed!"

"First of all," Saiyaman finally spoke. His voice was soft but strong, brooding with a caged danger. "You wouldn't have gotten away. There's a cordon a quarter mile up the road. You could have tried gunning your way through, but the Police would have cut you in half. Secondly, no. I could not 'just let us ride by.' You murdered four men back there. They probably were just waiting for Friday to enjoy the weekend. You sleaze. And thirdly, my 'problem' is punks like you."

Curly's finger stiffened on the steel trigger, but there was something intimidating in the 'laugh-less' style exuding from Saiyaman. Each time the crime-fighter took a step in, Curly stepped back, aim shaking and sweating bad from his tanned brow.

"It's your attitude," Saiyaman went on, arms still folded but his eyebrows fixed in grimly. "It's maddening. Just the arrogance. The casual murder. And then the nerve to get your oats up when justice catches up to you. And I did. Those are people's savings you got there. You're holding _lives, _for Pete's sake. And they earned it fair and square. Back from where you're from, Hicksville or somesuch, they never taught you the value of a hard day's work?"

"Taught me to never take buck," Curly answered coldly, and tried taking a step in. To intimidate 'the Great Saiyaman.' The man opposite didn't budge. He just kept his shaded stare, jaw set and arms still folded. "Taught me, that if you want something, then go out and get it. So I am. I'm gonna shoot you now. Then grab the money and run."

"And leave them behind?" Saiyaman crooked a thumb to the twisted jalopy. The other three were pitifully groaning.

Curly grimaced but steeled himself, shaking his head, getting up his nerve. "S'what happens. S'what you gotta do sometimes, some days. It ain't nothing personal…"

"I don't think they're going to see it like that," Saiyaman was smiling slightly. "Maybe I should mention that when they wake up. I'll tell them you were going to leave them behind, rob them of their shares, and leave them for the courts. I can think of a few choice things they'll have in store for you, once they get their hands on you at the county cells."

"Shut it," Curly screeched, youthful voice breaking in pitch. The shotgun was shaking badly now.

"You know…" Saiyaman murmured a little distantly. "You remind me. Of a horrible foe I fought years back. He was like you. He took what he wanted without apology. Evil to the very core, so evil it was almost childlike in its chilling purity. Point is he was an aggrandized thief. Blinded himself with arrogance so he never had to look at it like that. Sort of like you."

Curly's jaw was a little slack and he blinked.

Saiyaman loomed forward and leaned in, staring the boy down just a little deeper into the ground. "And you know what happened to him?"

No one saw the punch land. Curly's nose just broke open with a pressure-spurt of blood and fell back four meters and tumbled. His shotgun clattered away into the ditch. Languidly, the Red River gurgled and washed along a few yards away and across the paved levies. Saiyaman tucked his outstretched fist back to his side and stood a moment listening to the waters and appraising Curly's limp body. The cop air-cars began to wail closer in and land outside the ditches. Saiyaman's last thought for the whole affair was a dissatisfied headshake.

Now he remembered why he'd simply retired five years prior.

He stepped from the asphalt and was flying high, waving to the officers as they congregated the scene while paramedics flew in low and landed behind their cordon. Saiyaman took the chance to glance over the quiet Edgewater streets, hemmed by a hundred miles of raw greenery still untouched out there in the west. He tried to shut out his hearing. There were muffles of strained crying, roars of grief, choked sobs trying to comprehend the voids now ripped in their lives. Now he remembered why one day, he just walked away. Gohan felt his ki-aura flare with a violent shudder, one that rocked the neighborhood as he took off streaking for the deeper hinterlands.

A bowl of Videl's gumbo and a hug from little Pan would end the day on the note he needed.

Their home was a compound, nestled in a neat valley atop the low Mount Pao. The hinterland was 'wasteland'. Spans of deep forest and tall plains, high mountains leveling out into deep swells of sand and desert, the very deep of 'the middle of nowhere'. The air breathed was a sharp mixture of loam, pollen, animal, and a sweet tang of fresh water. The summer was proving to be agreeable this year, Gohan noted absently, photographic memory relating that this day, three hundred and sixty four earlier, was thirteen degrees cooler. Now the sun was unburdening warmth, scalding the higher plains and sending a few outcropped villages into water conservation methods. The scholar jinked down from the sky into a grassy hill-land and blazed the air with aura-trail.

The Son Compound was a series of tall rockcrete domes, a partial blend of igloo and pueblo temperaments. The original domes were the smaller huts, fashioned from local sandstone and super-heated clay. Where he'd been born, raised, fed, trained, and learned. Gohan unknowingly smiled. Everything about the old haunts was rustic and well-worn, lived in by a more than rough-and-tumble family. A ghost-visage of Chi-Chi came hurdling out from the kitchen window, heavy pan in hands, chasing a rapidly apologizing and assuaging Goku, yelling at her lung's formidable capacity that, again, his clumsy Saiyan hands had wrecked _another _chinaware dish.

Gohan would have chuckled harder to himself. Save that the memory wasn't a distant memoir from his pre-teens. It was last Monday.

The second, larger domes were his abode now. Chi-Chi and Hercule Satan had come head to head, and nearly blow to blow, when the issue of where the newly led Son Gohan and (now) Son Videl were to bunk after their exhaustive honeymoon. Mr. Satan's bravado and ego had tried to step over the housewife, promising to relinquish them one of his more opulent country mansions and bequeath the servant army to their care. He personally blanched at the offer. He'd had felt a tad more worse for it, had not Videl similarly sigh and tell off Hercule that she had no use for a hundred maids what she herself could accomplish in less fastidious manners.

So, it was settled. A shared complex with Goku, Chi-Chi, and Goten. He, his brother and father spent the following Spring erecting the high central dome, then the bedrooms, the kitchen, the living rooms, the spare closets. He'd specifically asked for a study. At that moment, five years prior he turned and expected Goku to be shaded with a bemused smile, how his warrior son was now the scholar son. Yet… Just an open smile, honest, plain, goofy. So Goku. So his father. Neither of them said a word when Gohan hugged him and near cried. Goku just hugged back. Some moments, the simpler ones, were a difficult lot. For none of them dared to take them for granted.

Gohan landed with a breeze-wisp at the fore-stones of a winding lawn path, set against a trimmed yard specked with ember-red blossoms and craggy, hardy ochre thistles. The tall library-dome, gray-tinged and pored to allow condensation a chance to seep out rather than freeze behind the rockrete and cause general havoc come winter thawing, rose up high by nine meters. A modest, stained dip-birch and glass windowed door was hung with a quaint 'Home Sweet Home.' Videl spent an August morning sewing that. Gohan recalled kissing her gently punctured fingertips that evening. The scholar-fighter was not beyond allowing himself a private, carnal smile and stepped in towards the door. It opened with a creak of ungreased hinges.

The center-study was first to greet him. Three stories of stacked shelves, carved from fiercely knotted timber that had been devilishly, sadistically difficult to manipulate through carpentry. Gohan unbuckled the heavy leather belt struck around his washboard stomach, then tossed the belt and emerald tunic unceremoniously onto the second, book and paper stacked desk on his right. Ordinarily, he kept four tables spread over the dark, navy-blue carpeting of the study floor. Each was stacked with dozens of books devoted to a singular subject. The first desk: chemical physics and physical chemistry, nonlinear science, spatio-temporal pattern formation. The second desk: cold mathematics, Abel's curve theorem, Copson's Inequality, cork plug, computation, quadratic curve, dot product, double contraction relation, the z-axis. The third desk: nanotechnology and nanoscience, the subtleties of bionanoparticles, supperlattices. And the fourth: astronomy and astrophysics, angstrom units, gas in galaxies, luminosity functions, solar system formation, magnetospheres, ionospheres…

It was all very thick stuff and ordinarily, the sheer input of shunting in so much learning on such manifold topics would adversely affect the mind. Yet, Gohan relished it. Videl was at a loss for explaining it to their friends, how her husband could whirl back and forth across the thousands of books and come away no worse for wear. His dark eyes glinted with shards of an enormous, burgeoning intelligence. Bulma, the great scientist-heiress herself, was rumored during Kame House's usual Sunday poker game to be considering signing him on to a permanent research post for Capsule Corp. But would Gohan take it? That was an entirely different problem.

Dressed now in just white boots toed with gold, long forearm gloves, and a tightly hugging charcoal bodyglove, Gohan rubbed lightly on his nose-bridge. The heavy felt and cushion down of his study chair accepted his weight with supporting gratitude, allowing the scholar to kick back on the chair rollers and skim to a more darkened corner of the center-study. Just a moment's contemplation, he told himself, staring off with a thin, humorless smile.

There was a knock at the study door, from outside the compound. Something tall with a physically imposing bearing blocked the light from the door window-lattices, rattling the dip-birch with curt knuckle-raps. The visitor didn't wait for Gohan or anyone of the house to approach or give a call to let his or herself inside. The brass knob seized with a light vibration, then twisted clockwise and allowed the door to swing on screech-pitched frame hinges. Gohan tensed, scattered loose paper aside with a light flare of _ki, _eying the intruder in a state of taut attention.

The man was physically arranged with a loose, deep purple training _gi, _belted at the waist with a tight length of baby-blue sash. The length of his tall, muscular frame was caped with a cloak of cream-white, stretched over heavy shoulder guards. His sculpted, bald pate was caped with a violet, top-curved fez wrapped in a similarly cream-white turban. The most striking feature, however, was not the man's garb. He was immediately, visibly, Namekian, his skin a proud tint of jade green, his facial visage sharp with hard cheekbones, a thin, jutting chin, and bright, nearly luminous eyes. Gohan's _ki _whisked back with a backwash whisper in the air and he mustered a kinder smile.

"Sensei," He greeted softly.

Piccolo, arms folded sternly, nodded but traded a small grin and walked closer to the recliner.

"Gohan. …I thought Pan was the one who preferred Pajamas around the house."

Gohan patted the stretched lycra over his pectorals. "Bulma's treating Videl and Pan to a sociable at the Capsule Corp. complex. Just a luncheon, but a luncheon 'with a lot of sweet gadgets'. So… I had the day to myself, so… What the heck? Why not? Put on the old spandex, grab the shades, go out and defeat some evil."

The Namek smirked. "So I saw."

The half-Saiyan noticed his jawline had grown warm with a blush. "You were watching? …Wait, you live on the Lookout. _Of course _you were watching."

"And I saw your usual cheer had been robbed," Piccolo added quietly. He had walked in behind the rolling recliner, a hand on his old student's thick shoulder.

"People," Gohan murmured.

"What?" Piccolo had heard him perfectly well. Now was needed clarity.

"Humans," He elaborated. "When I was born… I took for granted that I grew up feeling perfectly normal."

Piccolo's high brow arched. He'd heard the stories.

"…As normal as I could be, okay?" Gohan laughed. "I mean… Mom and Dad would sit me down sometimes; explain what was right, what was wrong. And to me hearing it made perfect sense. Don't hurt people, don't say mean things unless someone's being a jerk, don't steal…" He listed them out on the digits of his left hand. "And then…"

His bright face turned blacker and he looked away from Piccolo, eyes mixed with something sullen, brooding, and brackish anger. "…And then four men drive up to a small bank and murder their way through for the sake of a couple thousand Zeni. And then look at me and say 'How dare you!' when I step in. There are worse things, Sensei, I know. But when it came to violence, I was fighting on the side of justice. On keeping the world safe, on beating the bad guys. Making sure they'd never be able to commit the evils they did ever again."

Piccolo's frowned, yet nodded in his sage way. "And you're thinking 'What was their excuse'?"

"Yeah," He sighed, folding a fist beneath his top lip and lining the gloved knuckles to his eyes.

"…I don't know," The Namek put it, simply, in his uncomplicated manner. "Because there isn't. It's greed, pure and simple. Of having but not having enough, and reasoning that, by virtue of boldness, you can take what you want and not have to pay the consequences. That's where ones, like you, your father, our friends… That's where we come in. We may not step in every time a corner store is held up… But we don't let the greater evils pass us by. Not Raditz. Not Nappa. Not the Ginyu's or Frieza. Not Cell. Or Majin Buu."

He felt Gohan shudder in his grip. Majin Buu. _Super _Buu, as the moniker came later when the evil had grown so swollen it was like a force unto itself. Frieza would have violently defecated had he faced him, for all his spouting about inherent superiority, his monarchy, his status as supreme 'bad-guy'. Majin Buu was darkness in concentrate. Totally selfish, arrogant to the ultimate extremis. Nigh untouchable, on the point of potent invincibility. A creature that refused to die, that seemed to come back from every attack that sloughed through him, rending limb from socket and gooey bowels from his pinkish innards. He'd taken himself, Goten, Trunks, Gohan, their friends and families. _Ate _them and gathered his might from their combined powers. A thief, without a shred of moral compulsion. A _ki _thief. Gohan felt something abject and righteously pissed off roil behind the hard beat of his heart. The bastard. The total bastard, the rotten fiend. Through his youth, through his teens, well into his adulthood, he fought and clung to every shred of ability he could muster. Hours of practice. Hours of study and contemplation. Ten years of trying to keep up and be the man his Father had been. To make him proud. Buu? Cast from a lurid spell, by a degenerate wizard the Eastern Supreme Kai later turned into a corpse of smoked bone and fried flesh. Gohan only allowed himself room to truly hate a few key individuals. Cell and Super Buu vied for the position of his most loathed enemy.

Unconsciously, he pulsed his energy. There was a solid, sub-sonic knoll that shook the air, warming it. The dome walls for a moment bore condensation, sweating. The lamp-strips and high glow-lites dimmed, dancing spiral trails of electrochemical arcs back and forth. He heard Piccolo step back and softly gasp. It had been just a bare mote of what he had welled away, just a translucent shade. What he had trapped away was vast, mystic, and overwhelming. He stood up from the chair, fist clenched and watching the muscles along his forearm ripple in response. Gohan had been lean in his younger days, a boy in high school. Now: His chest was barreled out, legs denser and arms coiled with svelte musculature.

"He's still a trigger thought," Piccolo murmured from behind an impassive face, arms refolded around his waist. He was regarding Gohan almost wearily; trying to reconcile a totally inept lad he'd taken out into the vast plain-wastes to the uber-fighter who could rip mountains apart. Without a sweat.

"Hmmn?" Gohan looked up. "Majin Buu?"

"Yes."

He frowned, paused, then paced across the study floor and rested his knuckles against the second desk. A paper, entitled to a study of quantum chromadynamic gauge in variental Lagrange, was opened to page nineteen beneath his fingers. He stripped off a glove and touched the bare skin to his smooth chin. Gohan was still frowning when he turned back to his former mentor.

"He was a nightmare," He almost whispered. "As if every deity of deceit and chaos belched out their refuse and let it coalesce into… what… he became. A fat-man, no better than a child and irresponsible. Then a second form, a second variance, one with intelligence and the deviance enough to use it to broker as much power and ability that he could get his hands on. Then eat. …And then just a diminutive brat. But robbed of everything save enormous power, equaled only with his enormous lust for violence and total insanity."

"He still stalks my dreams, now and then," Gohan added.

The study grew quiet. A book resting on the north third story window sill spilled a page back and forth at the caress of a warm wind. Piccolo passed his eye over the myriad subjects, wondering how Gohan could reserve so much mental energy for the exercise of learning. Especially with his memory, honed now to be as if photographic. A feeling touched him. The Namek looked across to the half-breed; half Saiyan, half human. Once, in a moment of utter privacy and swearing him to an eternal oath of silence, Vegeta confessed a very rare relent.

_"For a half-breed?" He bored his infamously powerful stare up at Piccolo. "…I think he got off lucky, having the best of both."_

He envied Goku, now. Eternally cheerful, possessed of a kind of wanderlust and always able to choose a course through even the muddiest waters. Some called him an idiot, due to his simplicity in nature, totally devoid of avarice or greed (save for a devouring appetite), so easy to smile and laugh and get the most out of life. The truth of it, really, was that only he could appreciate just what he had. His power. His abilities. His wife. His children. Especially his wife and children. Piccolo walked up to Gohan's back and patted his wide palm over the man's shoulder blades. He then turned, cape fluttering against the back of his calves, walking to the door.

"You're leaving?" Gohan spoke up. He sounded a note disappointed.

"For a time," Piccolo drew his glance back over his shoulder staunch, lips turned up in his enigmatic smile. "I stay any longer and your Dad will have me convinced to go for a few sparring rounds. Right now, Gohan… Look after yourself, and your own."

"I will," He promised a solemn note.

Piccolo gauged another smile, halfway through the door, charging his aura for the long flight to Dende's Lookout. "And don't worry. The way this Universe works, we'll be up to our necks in some foul business before long. In the meantime, brace yourself. I can smell Chi-Chi's curry meatloaf from here."


	2. Chapter 2  Hollow Avenue

_Chapter 2_

_Age 789 - August 11__th_

-_West City-_

IN THE SOUTH END, slashed between three solid blocks of techno-industrial and general fabricating barn-silos, was a half-mile alleyway. Half-calve high with a sloshing, semi-solid layer of foetid trash-waste, it was named Hollow Ave. The local indentures, lower-middle class families and clans who'd been contracted to work for specific, and immensely competitive, manufacturing partnerships, were morose and fractious. The constant stench of chemicals ranging between anhydrous ammonia and acetic acid wreathed the air with pungent, awful aromas. It smelled like piss boiled in vinegar. The racket of singing machinery, belt and roll-bar conveyers, steel planers and jig borers, turning centers and cold saws, further soured any cheer with its razor keen, unmixable jangling.

Hollow Ave was disused, abused, and stoically ignored. Thick sheathe vents disgorged lime-yellow and graying-red expels, half watery with near acidic properties and half-chunky with unrecognizable flotsam, every fifteen minutes. The batch cycle ran from plant-opening, early five AM, to clocking out late at seven PM. No one stepped out back to Hollow Ave, not for any good reason. It stank; every five minutes spent multiplied chances for cancerous growths and malignant tumors, respiratory choke-off, and potential brain damage from nasal inhalation. Not to mention the chemical bath roiling below your knees could potentially eat away to the tibia. No one came out back to Hollow Ave. It was a rotten place, fetid and rank with pollution and rapid decay.

The noon zenith brought the sun overhead. The fabrication mills upped the circulation and stack-tower ventilation, locking into place heavy shutter-sheets over every window. The heat needed to be shut out, utterly denied. The slit of a road that was 'Hollow Ave' was already bubbling, the searing warmth activating reactions in the artificial soup. It turned into a smoldering miasma, with thick brow-high banks of colourless enzymatic fog. Pustule swells of filmy gas rose, burst, then re-formed on the 'swamp' surface. The trash-bath had roiled from a sickly tint of gold and piss into just a milk-white mess. In combination with a half-dozen other trash alleys situated across the South End, the curdling masses of pure liquid plastics and chemically burned metals oozed a short cloud cover. It was a motley calico overhang, mixed with hard whites, specks of acid-rain swollen black clouds, and skeins of mahogany-brown.

It grew darker still. There was something to the air now, beyond just the usual stench and malodor. Time and sense of 'place' grew stiff and a general feeling of increasing uneasiness began to pervade. For a moment, through the smog, the sun looked deathly pale, staring with uninhibited, malevolent wrath. The industrial cloud cover undulated, rapidly shifting from being just a purely manufacturing side-effect. It was like observing ink-drops piddling into a water basin, the unnerving and rapid expansion that swam out in every direction. The diseased brumes swept up with the hard caresses of stiff, hungry winds. Shades of white and stained brown mutated into stark, black ash-pitch, and began to detonate with dry thunder-claps. The South End shivered as the first winds whistled with a screaming keen down the streets, chilling the ambient temperature until moisture cooled, condensed, and then froze. All in the span of half and quarter minutes. The air barked another cannonade of thunder while the parent storm seethed with incandescent glows of brief, red lightning.

Hollow Ave was the vortex, the center of all the writhing phenomena. The fog-gloom had broken away to reveal the rotten soup, now just a quarter-meter thick stream completely overtaken by ice. Crystals began to freeze their way up along the sheet-metal and worn brick-concrete walls of the fabrication complexes, icicles like solid drool hanging in contorted geometry from strung lamps and light-posts. The taller buildings were kissed with vapid bolt-strikes from the sky, with arcs of wild electricity skittering down steel and rock until fizzing out with chuckling hisses. The smell of piss and vinegar was gone. There was now only the foulness of cooked ozone, the tang of iron and burning metal. Winds howled and raged up and down Hollow Ave, but still an inexplicable layer of white ash clung back to the iced trash-bog. The worst was yet to come, despite the rapidly billowing storm that was launching itself without restraint north across West City, despite the unearthly howls of angry wind, of the cold and chill.

The ice-bog shifted by half a centimeter. It was enough to puff the air with spurts of micro-crystal dust along where cracks etched down through the now solid pollutants. From somewhere sprung a source of reddish light, glowing every ice-bright surface with an uncanny, unnerving haze. The shadows flickered and distorted, bending to the shapes of grotesque, malformed half-things. Then, all colour faded away and the alley walls began to shine with the murky luster of volcanic glass. It was this moment when space buckled, when the air grew into a warping pocket midway along the half-mile slit of a back corridor. The air shrieked so hard it was the cacophony of harrowing, Hellish screams.

There was a final high pitched keen, before reality cracked and sundered, rent in two by the powers of some dark power and black magic. A void opened. An _absence. _A two meter tall portal that opened to nothing but oblivion, washing the chemical ice with streams of smudged mist. There was a taste in the air like blood and lead, acrid with metal and an unidentifiable but foul element. Surrounding brick and metallic walls rusted deep copper, before the ragged 'sores' began leaching thick dribbles of human blood. The void writhed, its faded edges twisting into the forms of clawed hands desperate for sensation, of any kind, of any sort. With all the difficult of birth pangs, it finally disgorged the travelers striding through the bent sheets of space-time.

The first thing to arrive through the portal was a beast. A warhound; a great one, a meter off the ground measuring from meat-fisted and scythe-clawed paws to sharp, ridged shoulder bones. The skin of the thing was hairless, a deep tint of gunmetal-grey bred into its flesh. The head was a bad dream, part jackal and part alien. The under jaw was distended to give it an exaggerated over-bite, with a lack of lips to enhance the appearance of thrashing incisors, razor canine-tusks, and black gums. It lacked traditional nostril cartilage, with four pairs of thin cavities running from the muzzle tip almost up to the brow. They surged open and closed with gushes of sickening breath. The eyes were black crystals, gashed through with white. It was collared by a restraining brace made of glossy, darkly green leather and iron strips. Each piece of wrought metal was inscribed with perverted characters that seemed to wriggle of their own volition.

The warhound trotted forward, its ribs rolling beneath the grey velvet-furred skin, tugged at its neck by the master-leash. The master-leash was a two-meter long chain constructed of what can only be described as organic metal. It looked chitinous, barbed like an insect carapace. What followed the animal was a party of some twenty individuals, appearing first as inky fog-clouds emerging from the portal. Then they took flesh and constitution. Each was a man, six feet tall or just an inch or so close, dressed in filthy threads. Frazzled scarlet pants and mud-flecked cyan vests or long-shirts, hugging re-sewn pale-brown storm-coats over their lanky builds. Their faces were jaundiced and coloured a rustic red, eyes bright behind long, black lashes of greasy hair. Expressions of maddened, unknowable delight played eerie smiles over their composure. Their leader, the man gripping to the warhound's leash, was the only one with a permanent grimace. Out of the twenty, his was the most intimidating presence. A meter and half tall on long shanks girded in black pants and thigh-high, armoured knee-capped boots, cloaked with an armoured shale-violet suit-coat with brass clipped tails, and looked as every bit vicious and mean as the warhound tugging fitfully at his grip.

Fylitch turned his gaze over his shoulder and blinked. The void-portal closed with a snap of jarring, howling air. A patter of briny rain-water fell from the smoldering sky overhead onto his suit lapel. A second later, the natural weather too far disturbed by the warping magic, it poured in an unrelenting hail of saline drops. Fylitch, unmoved, stared at his cadre.

"Do we know our purpose?" He asked. His voice was like a razor glancing off steel.

Each ratty accomplice nodded affirmatively. Fylitch motioned them on before following at the rear, his free-hand glazed in a purplish aura. He cast the spell, wrapping his accomplices up in a discharge that would keep them 'blank' from sight, near invisible save for light writhing off their smoky umbra. He collected a folded scrap from a pocket. In his palm, the unconnected, asymmetric petals of paper reconstituted. It showed a sketched and water-coloured portrait.

Fylitch committed to memory the image of a young adolescent girl, adoringly pretty with cherry cheeks and deep cyan hair pulled back in a high pony-tail.

-_West City / Capsule Corp_-

"IS THERE A STORM…?"

Trunks and Goten paused in their movements and looked up to Goku. The Gravity Chamber hummed a growling, sub-sonic tonality, the overhead lights bathed deathly pink as the reinforced steel-tritanium plat-decking under their feet vibrated gently at the enormous gravitational pressure. It wasn't called the 'Gravity Chamber' for a chuckle. Goten and Trunks breathed haggardly, brows and shoulders laced with salty dew, Goku sweating a tad lighter as he lifted his gaze to stare absently at the ceiling.

So typical of Capsule Corporation DynoCap aesthetics, the Gravity Chamber was a high-domed 'shed' and roguishly austere, on par with the humble Namekian organic-carapace growths they counted as their homes. It was white-washed metallic white, the molecular make-up of the paint so abused by the high pressure that it was permanently fused; bonded to the walls and underfoot decking. Strip-lights were ringed about the roof's diameter, skirting the circumference of trunk-pipes and cable-boughs that seamlessly wove into the thrice reinforced dome structure ribbing. A central pillar of gravimetric instrumentation brought out the feeling of artificial ambience, blinking cold micro-LEDs that rounded off weight figures and the variations in the microcosm gravity-well.

"No…?" Goten answered in hesitance, hunched forward with his palms clutched to his knees. "At least… It didn't look like so… On the fly in…"

Trunks landed, shook the chamber against the weight of hideous gravity, coming down from an air-combat _kata _routine he ended with a punishing, flat-handed razor slice, cutting the air so hard he could have bisected through a carbon-rod and then its neighbor behind. He wiped lavender hair from his sharp, blue eyes and regarded Goku. He was still standing off from the young pair, his arms clenched akimbo over his stomach and expression hidden beneath the dark shadow of his unruly hair.

"Dad…?" Goten asked, wringing his arm and loosening the ligaments, preparing for an endurance exercise.

Trunks padded his neck and collarbone with a white, faux-cotton hand-towel and stepped in to Goku's side. His gray eyes were affixed to some unseen point level with the horizon beyond the Chamber walling, chin set and looking as if he'd been caught off guard. Goku finally blinked and looked down to Trunks, adjusting the cloth belt-knot of his waist high _gi_-pants and smiling disarmingly. But he looked winded, like caught flat-footed and forced to contend with a stomach blow. Trunks could read the distraction in his posture and the way his jaw set, gray eyes boring like diamond augurs through whatever they glanced upon.

"Goku?" Trunks tapped his broad his shoulder, feeling uneasy. "What's up...?"

I… Don't know," He answered, stuttering a moment for the words, perplexed and deeply troubled for it. He swung his head back across his left shoulder, still pensive. "But it feels like something broke… But I don't know what that 'something' is. Everything just feels… very… wrong."

It was the temper of his voice. It was lack luster and matte, buried under misgiving. And it was totally unlike Son Goku. He'd always been possessed of humour, so quick to smile and laugh generously. Even in the face of abject annihilation, he could grin like a scoundrel, all devil-may-care and supercharged with an immortal confidence. To his friends, to the so many individuals he had a chance to know and bring a measure of his presence into their lives, he was the one man across stars and worlds that you'd absolutely want to have by your side should trouble come calling. In short, his spell of immoderate disturbance was a sick fugue. In the scarlet haze of coarse air and crippling gravity-weight, Goten and Trunks glanced at each other.

"When you say 'wrong'…?" Goten began.

"I mean like _wrong,_" Goku tried to illustrate, the hand idle on his right flank clenched solidly. "Goten. There's a very specific way, to how things work. Like how the mechanisms of the planet churn on and on, keeping everything order…"

Young Son Goten nodded, lips pursed back and half-observing Trunks in his peripheral walking to the central gravimetric control pillar. The harsh stifle of warm air ebbed and was replaced with still, cool, and cold, bright-white lighting from the overhead lamp-strips. The youngest son of the Son clan was too busy considering what his Father was trying to impart, to reach for his neatly folded pile of outer wear. Out of all of them: Roshi, Kami, Dende, Goku was the most subtly intrinsic. The best description was he would look at something, say an idle lily-thorn, and _understand _it. Not because he was self-taught in the realm of botany, but with incomprehensible whispers, it would speak to him of all its little secrets. Goku would never have the eloquence to explain it verbally, but he was never a wordy man. In the long and short, he knew the Earth and the world in return regarded him as kin. He spent his waking hours in tune with the natural order of things in an envious way. One of many things to envy him for. But that was the point of it, Goten reasoned, finally stripping out of his sweat-logged _gi _and into a comfortable set of dark jeans and a hugging grey and silver-lined t-shirt. Goku knew things they did not. He felt something was wrong, in a manner beyond description.

He asked if there were tidings for storms for the day. Just what had he meant?

Goku stood off to the side of a thick log-trunk of tightly wound cabling, strung to the wall with pinched bands of shine-wet copper. He'd traded his thin, baby-blue training tunic and baggy waist-pants for the familiarity of his fighting colors. A shirt of midnight blue, hugged to his chest by a _gi _of dark orange, belted at the waist by a knotted sash, and finished with wrist-bands and a well worn pair of weighted blue-red boots. He looked heroic then, tall and strapping, muscular with innate confidence and a solid weight of presence. He contended with Vegeta and Gohan as the top three greatest fighters across the Universe. Goku considered that was quite a boast, considering the physical make-up of the cosmos. But then, it came from the lips of the Supreme Kai.

He led Goten and Trunks from the Gravity Chamber, the doorway behind oscillating closed with a protective hiss of locking steel teeth, hydraulics, and numerous patented and prototype sub-systems that turned it from Chamber to Fortress. They walked, through the umbilical hall from gravity training into the interior of the Capsule Corporation. They'd tumbled down from the rabbit hole, that's how jarring the transition it was. The Gravity Chamber may have been a bare-bones suite, opulent only in its saving grace of high technology and sophistication. The parent-company building had that in spades, and so much more. They strolled through armoured-glass tunnels that briskly wound at the floor level of several twenty meter tall hangers, extreme laboratories working at the speed of light to experiment, invent, then perfect and patent. Often the, the glass would shade more and more opaque, hiding the glare of weld torches, amongst other things.

Trunks took it all in his stride and commented on nothing, save a short hello to a researcher passing by or thick-speckled engineers huddled together in cramped, tubular passageways. He'd been a cocky sixteen year-old when he, his family, and so many friends reunited for the 28th World Martial Arts Tournament. He was prodding close to twenty one now, and as Goku could see, the five years had wrought an indelible change. Something then interrupted his rumination. Capsule Corp. actually shook. It was a searing snarl, cloaked in the guise of chastening thunder. Goku broke out into a run, Goten and Trunks following at his heels. Their passage shook Capsule Corp. as they skimmed the floor with bare toe-taps. When they reached the fore-lobby, they could see past a stretch of low-level apartment rows into the sky.

At Goku's presence, the auto-doors slide open, gliding on ignominious mag-rails. The three cloistered on a spot just before the street-side sidewalks, where the entry walkway ended and was tended by neatly trimmed lawns of grass. The plant-blades swayed in the patterns of jade waves, hunted by mean winds that stirred from the east. It was still daytime, still daylight, but the sky… It was just endless rolling of blemished clouds, so black and purple-brown, beetling like a condensed ceiling near to the earth. Lightning with the colours of gold edged with ichor ripped the heavens open, then left with the clap-shock that followed. Goten watched to their left as the ripple of exploding air knocked a poplar from its roots on the Capsule Corp. lawn, carried it, then smashed it against a section of gradient walling. It splintered into cracked measures of wood and wind-milling bark.

"Unreal!" Goten gasped, shielding his face with a forearm against the gales.

Trunks was flicking the flat of his tongue along his incisors. He had a sudden taste that clung to the inside of his mouth. An eerie sapor of ash and metal tang, carried on the air. Goku was looking with a cold sober expression to the storms overhead. It was like a mixture of turbid eddies, coiling out in every direction only to swirl back inward. Anchored, lashed to the some vortex near ground like a vessel at berth.

"It's like a super-cell!" Trunks hollered over the wind. "Where did this come from! Goku! What's with thins thing? It feels…"

Wrong. He stopped himself from saying it; they could all feel it anyhow. It was so apparent to begin with that Goten was dumbstruck to how they could have been so blunt to its sensation. It wasn't just that the sky was a curtain of blackness; it held a grainy quality, like starring at a swarm of flies. A gloom was overtaking West City, leaving the atmosphere filled with the scent of ozone and bile. Goku blinked when the clouds parted and began cascading rain.

The water was brackish and inky, dirty as if flowed through a screen of soot. And it didn't arrive in degrees. All at once, an efflux of monsoon proportions broke cover from the storm curtain and dashed hurriedly to the ground. Worms squirmed from the rapidly flood lawn and crawled fitfully about Goku's boots, trying to avoid asphyxiation in the water logged loam. Goten and Trunks were murmuring to each other as lightning cascaded past overhead and struck a parked air-car resting across to the west from Capsule Corp. Goku wasn't listening. He was preoccupied with a vibe. There was a scratching echo at the base of his skull. Something incoherent but obscene whispered behind his ear. There! Goku snapped his gaze to the right, west along the front CCorp. avenue. A spark of _ki_, of life energy. Or… At least an approximation of it.

Because all three saw him. A tall man with ratty hair greased back, a gaunt face leering like a comic-mask, black eyes twinkling with the cold fire of stars, dressed in deep scarlet pants and a ruined cyan vest. Goten stared back, breath held, with Trunks muttering something coarse behind his teeth. Goku just stood tall and silent, gray eyes blank but horrified. He should be able to feel him, source his bright spot of living energy that was so abundant in all living things. What he measured from him… 'it' or what have you… was like dragging the undersides of his fingers against a corkscrew of jagged glass.

"Who are you…?" Goku whispered.

The man at the far end of the street stared a moment longer, then became an elongated slip of dark light, vanishing with a hiss-pop of warping air. There was a disconnected sound, like the wisp of a bell. There was a chime, a second, and then the sound of heavy rain spattering across rooftops and concrete, asphalt and loam, plying inches and inches of torrential pouring to every surface. All that was left of the strange, leering man was a low cloud of black flies and white smoke. Both dispersed in seconds, and Goku, Goten, and Trunks were left alone.

"I'm getting my blade," Trunks said softly and began treading back over the soaked lawn to the CC building's fore-lobby.

Goten looked up at his father, both he and himself soaked punishingly to the bone. "Dad? Just who was that? I could feel him…"

"I know, son," Goku murmured over the dribble of falling water. "He felt messed up, didn't he?"

"Yeah," He gulped. "Like he wasn't even supposed to be there. Like he was pushing away everything around him, so he could… exist. Dad? …What do we do?"

"We find him, Goten," Goku looked down to his boy, gray eyes warm despite the shiver of rain-chill. Smiling, tall, invincible. Like he always was. "We look for him and whatever evil he's brought along. And then we stop him."

"But…"

Goten looked around through the sheets of rain, of smoky gloom and hazed buildings surrounding Capsule Corporation. His eyes darted to the long shadows and inky darkness that seemed suffused to the world.

"What if he wasn't alone?"


End file.
